Overview

This tutorial walks you through the process of configuring workload management (WLM)
in Amazon Redshift. By configuring WLM, you can improve query performance and resource
allocation in your cluster.

Amazon Redshift routes user queries to queues for processing. WLM defines how those
queries
are routed to the queues. By default, Amazon Redshift has two queues available for
queries: one
for superusers, and one for users. The superuser queue cannot be configured and can
only
process one query at a time. You should reserve this queue for troubleshooting purposes
only. The user queue can process up to five queries at a time, but you can configure
this by changing the concurrency level of the queue if needed.

When you have several users running queries against the database, you might find
another configuration to be more efficient. For example, if some users run
resource-intensive operations, such as VACUUM, these might have a negative impact
on
less-intensive queries, such as reports. You might consider adding additional queues
and
configuring them for different workloads.